OneDrive for Business: Bigger and Better

Since the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO of Microsoft, we’ve seen a great number of updates from Microsoft showcasing their new direction and drive to stay on trend and ahead of the technology game. Just last month, Microsoft released Office for iPad, opening up a brand new market for the company, which had been left untouched for years. Now, the latest announcement has been released: OneDrive for Business users will no longer have 25GB storage (per user), but a massive 1TB each.

There’s no doubt Microsoft have found their future direction in delivering technology in-line with their new ‘cloud-first, mobile-first’ motto and this is just the latest announcement to coincide with this strategy. 2014 is set to be a year where cloud computing will keep rising for businesses and the power of mobile computing is more and more in-demand: both of which appeared on Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014.

Competitors in cloud storage such as Box and Dropbox are relatively recent companies when compared to Microsoft, and have more of a consumer-focus to them. In Microsoft’s latest blog announcing its massive 40-fold increase in storage entitled ‘Thinking outside the box’ (very nicely worded) it even addresses these companies, saying:

Some have come from the consumer world and are new to the enterprise software market and the requirements around delivering enterprise-grade cloud services.Microsoft

Microsoft understands the importance of the freedom gained from the cloud, as well as anywhere access on any device, but it also understands the business need:

Seamless integration - many companies use Microsoft software, and using OneDrive enables a seamless integration between this software (such as Office) and its cloud storage solution.

Collaboration – OneDrive offers rich sharing abilities: showing what you have shared, what has been shared with you and incredible real-time and simultaneous collaboration allowing workers to edit the same document when they want (and at the same time) with clear notes.

Auto-Sync – All files are automatically synced and saved to ensure you can leave one piece of work on one device, and go somewhere else to immediately pick up where you left it.

The key reason why a business will benefit from OneDrive however, is its holistic nature. As Microsoft say themselves, no other service will give users this level of cross-platform functionality, and instead of having to purchase ‘pieces’ of software and make them fit together, Microsoft can offer everything a business would need, all in one place. Not only does this have great cost implications, but it also helps to take a bit of that complexity out of your IT.

We recommend Office 365 for customers (which comes with OneDrive and its new 1TB storage) – from micro-businesses to enterprises – to give your business: email, intranet, storage, Office suite, social collaboration, video/audio-conferencing and messaging all in one fixed-fee package, leaving you to focus on running your business (as well as trying to fill 1TB of storage per user!)

What next?

You can see how Office 365 works for you with this 30-day free trial (for up to 25 users) so you can start seeing how your business could benefit.